Now those three pushed on into the wood, and there they found the blockhead lashed fast to a tree, howling with every breath, his pain past all bearing.

We pick up exactly where chapter 23 left off. The Four Saints — Guānyīn and three fellow bodhisattvas — had conjured a rich widow and her three daughters to test whether the pilgrims could resist a comfortable marriage. Only Bājiè failed, and this is where they left him: roped to a tree all night, bawling. 繃 is bēng, the taut-binding sense, to lash something tight until it strains — not the běng of a face pulled stern.

Pilgrim stepped up and said with a laugh, "A fine son-in-law you make! This late in the day, and still not risen to thank the bride's people, nor gone to bring Master the glad news — still hanging here putting on your show and playing the fool.

Pilgrim does not untie him. Pilgrim enjoys this. 賣解兒, mài xiè er, is what a street acrobat does — tumbling for coins in a market square — so the jibe is that Bājiè is hanging there as a paid performance. Note that 解 is xiè here, the entertainer's word, and not the jiě of "untie" that turns up a few lines down when Sha Monk actually cuts him loose. Two senses of one character, a dozen words apart.

Bah!

咄, duō — a bark of contempt. Something between "Oi!" and "Pah!"

And where is your good matron now?

The 娘 is the widow from the previous chapter's test, who had played the bride's mother. She was never real. Pilgrim knows this perfectly well, which is the point of asking.

Where is your wife now?

The wife is equally imaginary — the phantom daughter Bājiè spent chapter 23 trying to marry.

A choice bridegroom indeed — bound, strung up, and racked!"

繃巴吊拷, bēng bā diào kǎo, runs through the stages of a judicial trussing in four characters: bound tight, then strung up, then flogged. Pilgrim applies the vocabulary of the torture chamber to a wedding, and calls him 女婿, nǚ xù, "son-in-law." The joke is that every word is technically accurate.

The blockhead, seeing him come to jeer, was seized with shame; he ground his teeth and swallowed the pain, not daring to cry out.

Three 著 in one breath, and each is read differently. 著羞 is zháo — the "catch, come down with" sense, the same one in 著急 (catch anxiety) and 著惱 (catch annoyance); Bājiè catches shame the way you catch a cold. The other two, 咬著牙 and 忍著疼, are the ordinary zhe that marks an action still going on. Gritting, enduring.

Sha Monk, at the sight, could bear it no longer; he set down the baggage, stepped up, cut the ropes, and brought him down.

Sha Monk, characteristically, says nothing and simply cuts him down. 行李 is xíng lǐ, the party's luggage — the load Sha Monk carries the whole way west. Both 了 here are the le of a finished action, not liǎo.

The blockhead could only kowtow and bow to them, so unbearable was his disgrace.

難當, nán dāng — more than one can bear up under. 當 in its "withstand, sustain" sense.

There is a lyric to the tune "The Moon over the West River" in witness:

A tune-name, not a poem-title. 《西江月》 (Xī Jiāng Yuè, "Moon over the West River") is a fixed 詞 pattern — two matching stanzas of six, six, seven, six syllables — and Ming novelists slot their own words into it the way a lyricist writes to an existing melody. 為證, wéi zhèng, "in witness," is the standard formula for wheeling a verse on as evidence; its 為 is always wéi.

Lust is a sword that wounds the flesh; covet it, and calamity is sure to strike.

The lyric opens by naming the thing Bājiè could not resist: 色, sexual desire. Calling it a sword that wounds the body sets the register for everything that follows — this is a health warning as much as a moral one.

A fair one of twice-eight years, in comely paint and gown —

二八, èr bā — "twice eight," meaning sixteen. Chinese verse counts a beauty's age this way rather than saying the number outright, and sixteen is the conventional age at which she is most dangerous.

yet fiercer by far than any yakṣa fiend.

夜叉, yè chā, is the Chinese rendering of Sanskrit yakṣa, a flesh-eating demon of Buddhist cosmology. The two lines make a matched pair, and their whole force is the swerve: sixteen, painted, lovely — and worse than the demon.

You hold but one true stock of capital, with not a mite of profit to swell your purse.

Here the poem switches to accountancy, and stays there. 原本 is your capital, the principal you started with; the body's primal yang is a one-off endowment that earns no interest. Spend it on a night's pleasure and there is no 微利, not a mite of profit, to put back in the 囊 (náng, purse). Inner-alchemy texts really do talk like this, and the metaphor is not a joke — vital essence is a finite fund.

Best, then, to guard that fund and keep it close in store,

The book-keeping continues: 資本 is capital, 收藏 is to lock it away in store. 將 here is jiāng, the word that picks an object up and does something with it — "take your capital and stow it."

hold fast to it, and let it not run loose in wanton waste.

休教, xiū jiào, "don't let" — the 教 that makes something happen, not the one that means "teach." 放蕩 is dissolute, off the leash. The stanza closes on the same ledger it opened with, and Bājiè, still rubbing his wrists, is the object lesson.